“I don’t see how I’ve ruined your life,” I said. “I guess you’re disappointed?lots of people are?but I don’t think it’s fair to blame it all on your marriage. There are lots of things I wanted to do?I wanted to climb the Matterhorn?but I wouldn’t blame the fact that I haven’t on anyone else.”
“You. Climb the Matterhorn. Ha. You couldn’t even climb the Washington Monument. At least I’ve done that. I had important ambitions. I might have been a businesswoman, a TV writer, a politician, an actress. I might have been a congresswoman!”
“I didn’t know you wanted to be a congresswoman,” I said.
“That’s the trouble with you. You never think of me. You never think of what I might have done. You’ve ruined my life!” Then she went upstairs to her bedroom and locked the door.
Her disappointment was painfully real, I knew, although I thought I had given her everything I had promised. The false promises, the ones whose unfulfiliment made her so miserable, must have been made by Colonel Boysen, but he was dead. None of her sisters was happily married, and how disastrously unhappy they had been never struck me until that night. I mean, I had never put it together. Lila, the oldest, had lost her husband while they were taking a stroll on a high cliff above the Hudson. The police had questioned her, and the whole family, including me, had been indignant about their suspiciousness, but mightn’t she have given him a little push? Stella, the next oldest, had married an alcoholic, who systematically drank himself out of the picture. But Stella had been capricious and unfaithful, and mightn’t her conduct have hastened his death? Jessica’s husband had been drowned mysteriously in Lake George when they had stopped at a motel and gone for a night swim. And Laura’s husband had been killed in a freak automobile accident while Laura was at the wheel. Were they murderesses, I wondered?had I married into a family of incorrigible murderesses? Was Zena’s disappointment at not being a congresswoman powerful enough to bring her to plot my death? I didn’t think so. I seemed much less afraid for my life than to need tenderness, love, loving, good cheer?all the splendid and decent things I knew to be possible in the world.
The next day at lunch, a man from the office told me that he had met a girl named Lyle Smythe at a party and that she was a tart. This was not exactly what I wanted, but my need to reacquaint myself with the tenderer members of the sex was excruciating. We said goodbye in front of the restaurant, and then I went back in to look up Lyle Smythe’s number in the telephone book and see if I could make a date. One of the light bulbs in the lamp that illuminated the directory was dead and the print seemed faint and blurred to me. I found her name, but it was on the darkest part of the page, where the binding and the clasp drew the book together, and I had trouble reading the number. Was I losing my sight? Did I need glasses or was it only because the light was dim? Was there some irony in the idea of a man who could no longer read a telephone book trying to find a mistress? By moving my head up and down like a duck I found that I could read the exchange, and I struck a match to read the number. The lighted match fell out of my fingers and set fire to the page. I blew on the fire to extinguish it, but this only raised the flames, and I had to beat out the fire with my hands. My first instinct was to turn my head around to see if I had been watched, and I had been, by a tall, thin man wearing a plastic hat cover and a blue transparent raincoat. His figure startled me. He seemed to represent something?conscience, or evil?and I went back to the office and never made the call.
That night, when I was washing the dishes, I heard Zena speak to me from the kitchen door. I turned and saw her standing there, holding my straight razor. (I have a heavy beard and shave with a straight- edged razor.) “You’d better not leave things like this lying around,” she shouted. “If you know what’s good for you, you’d better not leave things like this lying around. There are plenty of women in the world who would cut you to ribbons for what I’ve endured…” I wasn’t afraid. What did I feel? I don’t know. Bewilderment, crushing bewilderment, and some strange tenderness for poor Zena.
She went upstairs, and I went on washing the dishes and wondering if scenes like this were common on the street where I live. But God, oh, God, how much then I wanted some kind of loveliness, softness, gentleness, humor, sweetness, and kindness. And when the dishes were done, I went out of the house, out of the back door. In the dusk Mr. Livermore was dyeing the brown spots on his lawn with a squirt gun. Mr. Kovacs was cooking two rock hens. I did not invent this world, with all its paradoxes, but it was never my good fortune to travel, and since yards like these are perhaps the most I will see of life, I looked at the scene?even the DANGER. MEN COOKING sign?with intentness and feeling. There was music in the air?there always is?and it heightened my desire to see a beautiful woman. Then a sudden wind sprang up, a rain wind, and the smell of a deep forest?although there are no forests in my part of the world?mushroomed among the yards. The smell excited me, and I remembered what it was like to feel young and happy, wearing a sweater and clean cotton pants, and walking through the cool halls of the house where I was raised and where, in the summer, the leaves hung beyond all the open doors and windows in a thick curtain of green and gold. I didn’t remember my youth?I seemed to recapture it. Even more?because, given some self-consciousness by retrospect, I esteemed as well as possessed the bold privileges of being young. There was the music of a waltz from the Livermores’ television set. It must have been a commercial for deodorants, girdles, or ladies’ razors, the air was so graceful and so somber. Then, as the music faded?the forest smell was still sharp in the air?I saw her walk up the grass, and she stepped into my arms.
Her name was Olga. I can’t change her name any more than I can change her other attributes. She was nothing, I know, but an idle reverie. I’ve never fooled myself about this. I’ve imagined that I’ve won the daily double, climbed the Matterhorn, and sailed, first-class, for Europe, and I suppose I imagined Olga out of the same need for escape or tenderness, but, unlike any other reverie I’ve ever known, she came with a dossier of facts. She was beautiful, of course. Who, under the circumstances, would invent a shrew, a harridan? Her hair was dark, fragrant, and straight. Her face was oval, her skin was olive-colored, although I could hardly make out her features in the dusk. She had just come from California on the train. She had come not to help me but to ask my help. She needed protection from her husband, who was threatening to follow her. She needed love, strength, and counsel. I held her in my arms, basking in the grace and warmth of her presence. She cried when she spoke of her husband, and I knew what he looked like. I can see him now. He was an Army sergeant. There were scars on his thick neck, left from an attack of boils. His face was red. His hair was yellow. He wore a double row of campaign ribbons on a skin-tight uniform. His breath smelled of rye and toothpaste. I was so delighted by her company, her dependence, that I wondered?not at all seriously?if I wasn’t missing a stitch. Did Mr. Livermore, dyeing his grass, have a friend as beautiful as mine? Did Mr. Kovacs? Did we share our disappointments this intimately? Was there such hidden balance and clemency in the universe that our needs were always requited? Then it began to rain. It was time for her to go, but we took such a long, sweet hour to say goodbye that when I went back into the kitchen I was wet through to the skin.
On Wednesday night I always take my wife to the Chinese restaurant in the village, and then we go to the movies. We order the family dinner for two, but my wife eats most of it. She’s a big eater. She reaches right across the table and grabs my egg roll, empties the roast duck onto her plate, takes my fortune cookie away
